reinforce my clarity

Inspired by torakowalski: Post a sentence (or two or a paragraph) from as many of your WIPs as you want, with no explanation attached

How anyone can just do a sentence is beyond me though...

( Currently un-named neverending Merlin fic of doom in which Arthur is a DI, Merlin is an intelligence analyst and things are getting weird in the city of Camelot: )

~

( Currently un-named neverending SGA fic of doom (notice a theme?) in which John is temporarily female-shaped: )

sassydemon's FFN page is now deleted so all the plagiarised fic are gone, hoorah!

In addition to the plagiarism of my 'And None Can Be Such Kings' she/he also plagiarised:

- a published novel called 'The Immortals: Evermore' by Alyson Noel
- the Merlin fic Fame and Fortune by melusinahp
- the Merlin fic Their Time by vail_kagami

All with the same replacement of the original character names with characters from DW and TW. Needless to say, all were better as written by their real authors... if there was ever proof necessary that characters in fanfic (I'm going to blow my own and their trumpets here and add well-written fanfic) are not interchangeable this was it because, funnily enough, none of the three fanfics plagiarised in this manner by sassydemon worked with the characters swapped. All it did was make Jack and the Doctor seem very OOC and the plots a bunch of crack because a plot that fits with Arthur and Merlin's world, characters and dynamic really won't work in the DWverse with Jack and 10's dynamic.

So I am still confused. Why do this in the first place, and why choose such awkwardly fitting fics to do it with?

by way of kijikun: Ask me any question about any of my stories/'verses/Au's, whether past or future or unwritten scenes and I will answer. This even includes the future of some verses that may potentially be spoilery. If you're really nice, I'll give you a snippet

Because I haven't written anything for a while and I could do with getting back in the way of it.

20,000 words down of the Merlin BigBang and I think I'm about halfway. Depends how much writing the rest of the plan is going to take, really.

I'm also starting to think I might be writing gen because I have no idea where Merlin and Arthur getting together would actually fit in! This is slightly bizarre. Maybe I can claim it's actually preslash? Or maybe they can get together right at the end, hmm...

Anyway. I have written the first big action-type bit and Nimueh just turned up so I am cautiously pleased with how it is going aside fom the mysteriously absent slashiness.

I've seen this floating around a bit lately so I guess that means it's time to look back again.

List of stories I've written in 2008:

Stargate: Atlantis:
A Brief Encounter (SGA/Torchwood crossover, Rodney/Jack, PG-13, prequel to A Holiday Humour)
Something New Under the Sky and the sequel Forms of Friendship (SGA/Buffy crossover, Teyla/Faith, PG)
The Finest Clothes Beneath (sequel to Naked Under These Clothes, John/Rodney, NC-17)

Torchwood:
Come On With the Rain (Jack/Ianto, PG)

Merlin:
First Night (tag to episode 1, gen)
The Worst Servant (drabble, gen)
And None But We Can Be Such Kings (Merlin/Arthur, R)
A Little Fire to Warm (Merlin/Arthur, PG-13)
Blue-eyed Death (drabble, gen, flashfic tag to episode 8)
Treason to Us (Merlin/Arthur, PG-13, flashfic)
Passing the Test (tag to episode 11, gen)
The Evil We Make (Nimueh, gen, flashfic)

( and the rest of the meme )

So that Merlin fic I mentioned is still going - I thought I might get it finished for today, but apparently not. I wrote all the way up to the breath before the kiss that night, and then when I came back to it I realised that I needed a lot more build up to get there. I have now added about 2000 words and still haven't made it to the actual kiss.

But it reminded me of a comment I got on my first Merlin fic - someone said it was nice to see a longer fic. And I laughed before I replied, because that one was a bit less than 1300 words and I would never have considered it as being 'longer'. I suppose it was longer than other Merlin stuff around back then, but it made me think about how I perceive fic lengths. You see, my main fandoms, in chronological order, are Highlander, due South and Stargate: Atlantis and I've also read a fair amount in Smallville and Harry Potter - and in any of those, 1300 words would be a short fic.

So I tend to think of anything less than a few thousand words as short, 5000 - 10,000 words as fairly standard and I don't start classing fics as long until they're 30,000 - 50,000 words.

Short pieces can be beautiful, or incredibly powerful or sometimes hilarious, and a bad long fic is just as irritating as a bad short one. But I think it must be very unsatisfying to have a fandom where everything is what I would call short.

Like that original commenter, I'm glad that there are fics of a bit more length arriving in Merlin fandom now.

by way of fajrdrako:

( writer's questions and answers )

20. Tag some friends, because they'll hate you for it.

*grins* trobadora since she's all about the writing issues lately, torakowalski and buzzylittleb.

I resolved to try and do more fic writing. This led, somewhat indirectly, to my signing up at crossovers100, with the idea of writing 100 crossovers of SGA with something else.

Yes, I probably have gone insane, why do you ask?

Anyway, this post is to put the prompt table somewhere ( nice and handy )

So there we are. Wish me luck.

I've done a bit more thinking about the planning of my ongoing girl!John WIP and actually managed to organise my notes into something resembling a running order and a three section plan.

The good:
1. I have completed the first of the three sections (I think) and started the second (the boundaries between them are pretty blurry, but that's currently how I'm thinking of it)
2. I have a pretty good idea of what is going to make up section 2, though the order isn't set in stone
3. I got some better ideas this week about how to do some of 2 and 3, which is cool

The bad:
1. Section 3 is a little sparse with plot ideas aside from the personal/emotional
2. On finishing section 1, it stands at approx. 49,500 words
3. This means I probably have at least that much to write again
4. This also means that it is likely to be the longest thing I have ever written, and I'm including my PhD thesis in that
5. This is very scary

But as a way to avoid actually working on the fic, it worked out really well... what, I can't procrastinate? But it's my major talent!

So the Regency AU was the largest fic I've done to date, taking up 96 or so pages of my preferred format and slightly under 48200 words.

The current WIP? Stands at 68 pages and 33300 words, and I'm less than halfway through. Probably quite a lot less, considering the number of things I have planned to come up.

Scary. Given how long it took me to do ADD, I may not get this one finished this decade...

I hope I haven't bitten off more than I can chew.